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Coroners and Justice Bill

I strongly support the sentiments that underlie the interventions of my noble friends Lady Finlay of Llandaff and Lord Walton of Detchant. However, I should like to enter a cautionary note, partly from the very experiences that my noble friend has just referred to at Alder Hey Children’s Hospital. For 18 years I served as a Member of Parliament for a Liverpool division and I was involved with the parents of some of the children whose organs and tissues had been retained. The noble Lord, Lord Walton, was right to put his finger on a central question there—that the parents themselves did not know about the retention of those organs. Their permission had never been sought and it came as a terrible shock to them to learn subsequently that the remains of their children had been retained. To go through the funeral services and cremations that subsequently occurred often years after the event and the reopening of the grief involved was a terrible ordeal for those parents. So we must tread sensitively. However, I think that the case advanced by my noble friends is overwhelmingly correct. If we can derive knowledge by the retention of organs for a reasonable period of time that we could not derive from an autopsy immediately after death—for instance, in the kinds of circumstances that my noble friend Lady Finlay described—then surely any reasonable person would accept the force of that argument. Often parents are traumatised when their children have died, and that includes the parents of the children who died in Alder Hey hospital itself. I declare a non-financial interest in that two of my own children were treated in that hospital, which is a very fine hospital. Perhaps the worst thing to come out of all that experience was the damage done to its reputation because of decisions that had been taken over the heads of the parents in the belief that the scientists and the medics involved in a sense knew best. The arguments that have been advanced are rational, reasonable and intelligent. I think that if they are put properly to parents in these circumstances, permission will be given. However, the important thing is not to presume or to press ahead on the presumptive basis that we know better than others. With that brief cautionary note, I conclude my intervention.